Monday, January 25, 2016

Building a successful software platform

Building a successful software platform is done by building software with a purpose by solving a problem that people already have. The problem may not be obvious, and it may not even be a problem that people are aware of, but the problem exists. Using Instagram as a case study, I think there are four keys a platforms success.

Intrinsic Value

Most people aren't professional photographers. They don't have access to the tools professional photographers use nor the time or money to buy the tools and learn them. But they do want professional looking photos. Instagram built a platform that had intrinsic value on it's own by providing people the ability to easily create professional looking photographs.

Simplification

One of the keys that made Instagram successful was that they took something people were already doing and made it easier and better. They removed the need to download photos from a mobile device and then upload them from a desktop or laptop. They simplified the process and allowed users to share exiting photos right from their phones or take a new photo to share.

They also simplified an otherwise complex photo editing process by providing a set of templates that people could apply without having to understand image editing. This enabled a regular person to have professional looking photos without any work.

Interoperability

One thing that Instagram did very well is that it built it's software to work with exiting services like Facebook and Twitter. Services that already had a huge community of users. They didn't try to re-create Twitter or Facebook. Instead, they allowed Twitter and Facebook to get better by making their service interoperable.

Choice

Instagram didn't force people to ONLY use their service. Instead, it allowed people to continue to use their existing social media services and augment a specific workflow to be better if they wanted to. Users don't want to be asked to chose between this OR that. They want to be able to use this AND that. Will your software provide additional choices or limit choices?

About Me

I’ve been in the technology industry for 14+ years mostly as a Software Developer. I've worked on projects ranging from a Ruby on Rails Portal, a high performance/low latency .NET search stack, R&D for building infrastructure in the cloud including automated server builds using Chef, to architecting and building iOS and Android Mobile platforms and frameworks.I've also spent some time building Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and Bada mobile applications that focused on the presentation of long form audio/video.The middle of my career was spent at MSNBC working on their content management publishing platform, their video syndication system, as well as being a co-creator of their iOS iPad framework from which the Rachel Maddow, Today Show, and Nightly News iPad apps were built.Finally, the beginning of my career was spent writing software on government contracts with a few years spent writing criminal investigation software.